And Now the Schiff Memo by James Howard Kunstler

The excruciating quandary President Trump presents to the nation is dragging the sad remnant of the thinking class ever-deeper into a netherworld of desperation, paranoia, and mendacity that may exceed even their own official fantasies about the enemy in the White House.

Everything about the lumbering, blundering occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue drives his Dem/Prog opponents — or #Resistance, if you will — plumb batshit: his previous incarnations as a shady NYC real estate schmeikler, as a TV clown, as a business deadbeat, as a self-described pussy-grabber… his vulgar casinos, his mystifying hair-do, his baggy suits and dangling neckties, his arrant, childish, needless lying about trivialities, his intemperate tweets, his unappetizing associates, his loutish behavior in foreign lands, his fractured, tortured syntax, his obvious insincerity, his sneery facial contortions… and lots lots more — and of course that doesn’t even touch the actual policy positions he struggles to articulate. In sum, Trump represents such a monumentally grotesque embarrassment to the permanent Washington establishment that they will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the removal of this odious caitiff.

And in the process abandon all reason and decency.

To complicate matters, there really are policy differences that, despite Mr. Trump’s oafish profferings, must somehow be faced for the sake of the country’s future — two of the clearest, just for example, being whether we will have coherent, enforceable immigration laws and whether we will continue to allow the sale of tactical military rifles to the general public.

These are matters, by the way, which people of sound mind and honorable intentions could actually resolve through open legislative debate. And beyond these two examples stand an array of even deeper, urgent, thorny questions as to how this political economy might navigate through a bottleneck of hardships rushing toward us, namely, the systemic failures of finance, income inequality, health care, education, energy, agriculture and the global competition for dwindling resources.

But the activities of the #Resistance appear determined instead to drive the country needlessly toward war with Russia, the arch-hobgoblin they have conjured up like some Hollywood computer graphical alien monster of slavering insectile malice. Having created the monster, and the story-board to go with it, they have filled their own minds with a horror of their own creation, orders of magnitude worse than the rather pathetic figure of Donald J. Trump, the con-man who surprised himself by getting elected president at an anxious moment in history.

And in creating this horror movie, the #Resistance is dangerously perverting institutions that may not recover from being written into the script. For instance, the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, and sundry intel outfits whose highest officers have been enlisted as cast members. Can I be alone in wondering how these agencies can mount massive prosecutions of nobodies like George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates while ignoring the much better documented intrigues of officials such as Bruce Ohr, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, John Brennan, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Hillary Clinton, and possibly even the sainted Barack Obama? Or how they can retain any credibility if these figures just slide off into the gloaming with get-out-of-jail-free cards.

In case you’d like to know, I am personally uncomfortable about Donald Trump as President. I can imagine scenarios in which he might have to be removed from office by constitutional means, in particular, the 25^th amendment. But the spectacle of roaring dishonesty mounted by his adversaries from even before the election of 2016 disgraces the very class citizens who we used to depend on to think clearly about the fate of the nation.

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New Paintings by JHK 2016 — 2017